As Sichuan picks up the pieces following this week’s earthquake, the news focus is switching from death statistics to survivor interviews. The Toronto Star, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times all report on the powerfully mixed emotions swirling through the province, while NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ continues to its excellent string of gut-wrenching reports from the region.
First, Bill Schiller in the Toronto Star:
At 2:27 p.m. Monday, 34-year-old Zhu Rong Qiang was standing in his home in the mountain town of Beichuan, talking to a friend by phone.
At 2:28, he was lying on the floor – buried in rubble.
In that single, devastating moment when the earthquake hit, his world changed.
His home was gone, both of his parents were dead and his beautiful 4-year-old son Zilin perished in his kindergarten class when the school he attended collapsed on top of him.
Yesterday at the Mianyang Sports Stadium – just across the highway from the rubble of Beichuan – Zhu was one of thousands with a heartbreaking story to tell.
The Los Angeles Times tackles the issue of the one-child policy and how it has added the grief of parents who lost children in the earthquake, while NPR has posted interviews with survivors from the Juyuan Middle School, which collapsed, killing hundreds of students:
We visited Huang Zhiwei in his home village just a few miles from the school. He greeted us in English and told us what happened Monday afternoon. He’d been in history class when the earthquake struck. His teacher stepped out to see what was happening, saw things falling from the roof, and told the students to get out. They ran down the staircase, which today, is the only part of the school still standing. Huang says most of his classmates are alive today because they ran. He remembers hearing the sound of the school collapsing behind him.
But the same is not true for the class that Huang’s friend Wei Bo was in. Wei, also 15, was in politics class that afternoon. His telling of what happened is heartbreaking. His teacher, he says, did not realize just how serious the situation was. The teacher told the students to calm down, to stay seated. The building came tumbling down on the class.
Finally, the New York Times reports from Juyuan on earthquake victims’ rising anger over government officials’ role in the disaster even as prime minister Wen Jiabao leads the rescue efforts:
These children symbolized the earthquake’s seemingly indiscriminate cruelty. But the cruelty, in the eyes of their parents, was also man-made.
Several schools in nearby Dujiangyan collapsed while classes were under way. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited two of them, including Xinjian Primary School, where parents say officials told him the death toll was 20 pupils.
“I am Grandpa Wen Jiabao,” the prime minister said as he watched two children being pulled from the rubble, according to Xinhua, the official state news agency. “Hold on, kids! You’ll definitely be rescued.”
But enraged parents interviewed at the morgue on Wednesday afternoon and early Thursday morning say local officials lied to the prime minister to hide the true toll at Xinjian, which they estimate at more than 400 dead children. Several parents blamed local officials for a slow initial rescue response and questioned the structural safety of the school building. They were also furious that officials forbade them to search for their children for two days and then allowed access to the bodies only after the parents formed an ad hoc committee to complain.
